Why take photos? Amateur Images of Deprivation and Killing During the Third Reich + Fog in August film screening

Please note this is a COVID safe event. Tickets (free) are required and seats are limited. If tickets are unavailable this means the venue is full. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience. The exhibition, lectures and film are fit for viewing by persons aged 15 years or more.

Imagine compiling an album of photos that opens with baby christenings and weddings, transitions to family picnics, but then reveals photos of deprivation and mass killing. It seems a bizarre and macabre way to compile a family album, but in Germany during the Third Reich, this was a trend. 

This lecture reveals the importance of the amateur photographer in Nazi Germany, including their promotion of Nazi ideology, as well as the way these photos and albums ''normalised'' mass atrocity. The talk will explore how such photos might suggest widespread knowledge of mass killings among the everyday German population. Why did Germans take photos of such distressing content, and how did this practice become a widespread and seemingly normalised practice? 

The film Fog in August (Nebel im August), 2016, directed by Kai Wessel is based on the novel of the same name by Robert Domes who was inspired by the documented true story of the 14 year old Yenish boy Ernst Lossa (1929–1944). Ernst's story is also featured in the exhibition registered, persecuted, annihilated.

Lecture and film introduction delivered by: 

Dr Kirril Shields, 

Atrocity Prevention Grants Program Manager, 

Asia Pacific Centre for The Responsibility to Protect

School of Political Science and International Studies,

University of Queensland

Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

With the kind support of